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The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

bytecodealliance.org

31–40 of 111 posts

Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#31
I will be interested in getting details about the experiments of Ryan Hunt about DOM performances.

I am currently developing a WASI runtime for exaequOS and Woua programming language that will target WASI and will have access to DOM through a virtual/dev/dom driver.

wex —dir /dev /usr/tests/woua/dom_demo.wasm

Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#33
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious if people have a good story for why WASI will succeed where Java failed

Programs written in Java require installation of a middleware called Java runtime. It adds extra friction for end-users. And even if one has Java runtime installed, a newer version may be necessary for a recently-published application. With WASM it may be the same, unless al major OS vendors integrate a WASM runtime so that it doesn't need to be installed separately.

It is exactly the same for WASM outside of the browser, and Java has Android as counter part to built in runtime.

Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#34
post #2

I'm unreasonably excited about WASI. WASI is the thing which takes WebAssembly from a tool for running stuff in a browser to a tool that can run entire portable sandboxed applications on a computer - with controlled filesystem and network access. I don't ever want to run untrusted code from the internet outside of a sandbox ever again. If WASI lives up to its full potential I won't have to - we'll have a robust, cros…

The thing that interests me the most is that execution is deterministic. If the inputs to a WASM module are logged you get durable execution and rr style reverse debugging as part of the package.

Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#35
post #2

I'm unreasonably excited about WASI. WASI is the thing which takes WebAssembly from a tool for running stuff in a browser to a tool that can run entire portable sandboxed applications on a computer - with controlled filesystem and network access. I don't ever want to run untrusted code from the internet outside of a sandbox ever again. If WASI lives up to its full potential I won't have to - we'll have a robust, cros…

I like the technical design of WASM, but I feel that better OS sandboxes for regular native code will be the common approach to running untrusted code.

As soon as you compile to WASM you no longer have the C FFI and the ability to call the OS systems interfaces for files, network and others.

It is extra work to move something to WASM vs just compiling it and running it in a sandbox.

Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#37
post #2

I'm unreasonably excited about WASI. WASI is the thing which takes WebAssembly from a tool for running stuff in a browser to a tool that can run entire portable sandboxed applications on a computer - with controlled filesystem and network access. I don't ever want to run untrusted code from the internet outside of a sandbox ever again. If WASI lives up to its full potential I won't have to - we'll have a robust, cros…

Use cases I am more excited about: 1) Replace webhooks in web apps with wasm binaries provided by the customer, but that run in the web app servers. 2) Safer plugin system for professional software (plugins for photoshop, plugins for IDEs, etc) 3) Safer mod system for games and server-side mods that run on the game-maker server.

i had this same vision when i created hyper-mcp with modular plugin system via WASM plugins. Too bad, the community moves on from MCP to CLI with coding agent

https://github.com/hyper-mcp-rs/hyper-mcp

Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#38
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programs written in Java require installation of a middleware called Java runtime. It adds extra friction for end-users. And even if one has Java runtime installed, a newer version may be necessary for a recently-published application. With WASM it may be the same, unless al major OS vendors integrate a WASM runtime so that it doesn't need to be installed separately.

It is exactly the same for WASM outside of the browser, and Java has Android as counter part to built in runtime.

Yes, but inside the browser is a freaking big use case.

Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#39
post #2

I'm unreasonably excited about WASI. WASI is the thing which takes WebAssembly from a tool for running stuff in a browser to a tool that can run entire portable sandboxed applications on a computer - with controlled filesystem and network access. I don't ever want to run untrusted code from the internet outside of a sandbox ever again. If WASI lives up to its full potential I won't have to - we'll have a robust, cros…

Hey, this is also my interest. I was just looking into whether it was possible to e.g. build an archive extractor that runs like a normal program but does the actual extraction completely in wasm. Unfortunately, AFAICT it's possible but requires custom code; you can't ( yet , I hope) just compile unzip/libarchive/whatever with CC=wasicompiler and get a sandboxed binary. But we're getting close.

What do you mean? You absolutely can run compression in WASM.

For example here is Gzip in WASM: https://github.com/ColinTimBarndt/wasm-gzip

Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#40
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is exactly the same for WASM outside of the browser, and Java has Android as counter part to built in runtime.

Yes, but inside the browser is a freaking big use case.

Not really, I don't need COM / CORBA on the browser.
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